Giving the Right Its Day in Court

The hot young lawyer representing Gov. Pete Wilson in his legal attack on affirmative action feels discriminated against “all the time” because he is blond, blue-eyed and male.

While at Stanford law school, Robert J. Corry sued to block a campus speech code banning insults based on race, religion, national origin and gender. He prevailed. Critics called him a Nazi, a label he rejects.

“Anyone who calls me a Nazi couldn’t be more wrong,” said Corry, “because the Nazis advocated big government that controlled everything--national socialism--and that view is totally opposite to what my view is.”

Corry, 28, is now a rising star for the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative advocacy group that was thrust into the public eye when it took on the governor as a client, free of charge.

That Wilson chose Pacific tells a lot about its growing prominence in legal circles after two decades in the ideological trenches, pushing a menu of conservative causes with a libertarian tinge.

Founded by backers of Ronald Reagan near the end of his tenure as governor as an antidote to the ACLU and other liberal advocates, the Pacific Legal Foundation has helped create a presence in public interest law for the right. The nonprofit group’s success has spawned about a dozen like-minded legal foundations across the country.

Traditionally, public interest law has been dominated by organizations defending the rights of an ethnic group or geared toward product safety, welfare rights and environmental protection. Liberal public interest lawyers won landmark court victories in the 1960s and enhanced the legal status of minorities, consumers, the poor and wilderness lands.

Pacific tries to do the same for conservative causes, spinning out briefs and legal arguments from a business park two miles from the state Capitol and smaller offices in Alaska and Washington state. The motive is not always to win the battle at hand, but to prevail in the larger war.

“They are responsible for major issues percolating up through the courts and up to the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Washington lawyer Theodore B. Olson, a former Reagan administration lawyer who sits on the boards of other conservative legal groups. “What they do is very important nationally.”

Pacific’s favorite causes involve property rights. The foundation has filed or joined lawsuits attacking rent control, zoning and regulations that protect wetlands or endangered species, arguing that environmental laws often lead to unlawful “takings” of private property.

The lawyers also have successfully argued that UC students should be spared paying fees for political activities they oppose, entered tax cases to argue that voters should decide taxation, and fought diamond lanes on the Santa Monica Freeway.

“Corporations don’t litigate things for the principle the way we do,” said Anthony T. Caso, a heavyset, bearded 41-year-old who supervises the foundation’s other lawyers. “What we are trying to do is blaze a trail.”

In the Wilson case, the foundation is representing the governor in his attempt to eliminate five state laws designed to help women and minorities get state jobs and state contracts. Wilson needs a court decision to dismantle affirmative action because the Legislature established the programs.

Appellate judges have refused to give Wilson a quick victory, ruling that he must first take the lawsuit to a trial court.

Liberal critics sneer at Pacific’s public interest label, which allows it to operate as a tax-exempt foundation. They charge that the group is driven less by ideology or idealism than by a wish to please its corporate contributors.

In its early years, Pacific fought to let the banned pesticide DDT be used to combat a moth epidemic hurting agriculture, backed the building of Auburn Dam--a project dear to Sacramento-area developers--and supported the use of herbicides in federal forests.

Few, however, discount Pacific’s aggressiveness. Every time environmental groups litigate “takings” cases, “we find that the Pacific Legal Foundation is already there on the other side,” said John Echeverria, general counsel to the National Audubon Society.

“They are representing a point of view, a philosophical point of view, and they represent it very well,” said California Supreme Court Justice Stanley Mosk, a liberal on the generally conservative court.

Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which is fighting Wilson’s affirmative action lawsuit, said the foundation’s political bent generally benefits white, wealthy men.

“They clearly have become a legal appendage to the far right,” Rosenbaum said, “and they do it with a zeal and frequency that makes sure the ideological agenda of the far right is expressed in legal terms and in principal cases throughout the country.”

Another view, expressed by UC Berkeley law professor Steve Barnett, is that Pacific’s brand of activism has been healthy because it ensures that conservative ideology will be represented in the legal system. “They have been on the winning side in a number of significant cases, so in that respect they are influential,” Barnett said.

In the foundation’s hushed Sacramento headquarters, adorned with framed prints and potted plants, the lawyers are mostly young and clean-cut. The men tend to favor suspenders, the women business suits. All are white, though the staff has included minorities before. “If the top candidate is a member of a minority group,” said Robert K. Best, the foundation’s president, “that is certainly extremely attractive to us. You can’t quote me saying we give preferences.”

Only in the lawyers’ private offices can one glimpse the ideological edge. Outside Corry’s door, a “Gramm for President” sticker is posted. Inside is another sticker: “I’m pro-hemp and I vote!”

Corry, a Republican, said the latter was intended as a joke although, like Libertarians, he believes the legalization of marijuana should at least be discussed. He also contends that federal prosecutors violate property rights by seizing assets in drug cases.

Pacific’s 13 attorneys came to the conservative cause from different paths. Caso, who has been with Pacific 17 years, arrived on a fellowship to learn more about practicing law and gradually grew to embrace the group’s agenda. James S. Burling, who regularly fights environmentalists, had been a geologist for a mining company and grew to abhor many kinds of environmental regulation.

Corry, the son of an Iowa kidney transplant surgeon and graduate of the University of Colorado, said he has been a conservative for as long as he can remember.

The foundation recruits at law schools and aims to pay salaries commensurate with government scale--in Corry’s case, about $37,000 annually after nearly two years. Although low-paid by private sector standards, Pacific’s lawyers still tend to earn more than if they joined the ACLU or a poverty legal clinic.

Money, however, is not their only compensation. Aside from the partisan satisfaction, Pacific lawyers get to argue highly publicized cases before appellate courts without first putting in decades on routine law work. That can bring quick recognition. Corry was recently named by the National Law Journal as one of the nation’s lawyers under 40 “who are likely to be the leaders of tomorrow.”

“Working at PLF,” said Corry, who wears his hair short and slicked to the side, “we are part of the revolution. . . . The mission is the important thing.”

This mission is a blend of conservative Republican and libertarian philosophies that mirrors neither perfectly. “We’re mainstream America,” Caso says.

Pacific does not take on abortion issues and parts ways with libertarians by supporting laws against the sale of drug paraphernalia and opposing needle exchanges.

“To the extent it mirrors the current Republican agenda, it is because they joined us,” said Best, a serious, bespectacled lawyer who headed Caltrans under Gov. George Deukmejian.

The late J. Simon Fluor, chairman of the Fluor Corp. in Orange County and a prominent benefactor of conservative causes, helped start the foundation in 1973 and became its first chairman out of frustration with regulations impeding land development.

The current board of trustees includes a Humboldt County rancher, the senior vice president of National Bank of Alaska, attorneys and a real estate developer. The only board members from Southern California are April Morris, vice president of Standard Pacific in Costa Mesa, and San Diego attorney Thomas A. May. UC Regent Ward Connerly, who spearheaded the recent campaign to dismantle UC’s affirmative action programs, is a former trustee.

Legal targets are chosen by consensus. Foundation lawyers comb newspapers looking for cases that have a chance of going to the U.S. Supreme Court and in which they can offer friend-of-the-court arguments. Like-minded conservatives also refer cases, and the group occasionally represents people who call with problems.

Fighting affirmative action is a growing entry on the agenda. “For me, it is the type of personally rewarding case that I came to the foundation to work on,” said Caso, who is supervising Corry’s work on Wilson’s lawsuit. “When it comes down to it, I don’t care what [Wilson’s] motives are.”

Pacific’s biggest victory came in a 1987 case against the California Coastal Commission. Pacific represented a landowner who objected to providing a public right-of-way across his beach property in exchange for permission to rebuild his home. The Supreme Court ruled in the owner’s favor in the landmark case.

So familiar are appellate judges with Pacific’s work that when Corry was looking for a firm to join, he said, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia suggested he consider Pacific. Scalia was at Stanford to address conservative law students. Corry asked where he could find work in constitutional law that would blend with his ideology.

“He mentioned the Pacific Legal Foundation,” said Corry, “and with that endorsement I had to come here.”

This notoriety rankles some rivals. “The thing that I found most disturbing,” said Joanne Spalding, an attorney for the Sierra Club, “is that while they purport to represent the interest of small landowners, the interest they are really representing are big developers, big industries and extractive industry. . . . I find it very dangerous.”

A 1984 Yale Law Journal study of Pacific and similar legal advocacy groups questioned their tax-exempt status, arguing that their cases tended to benefit corporate contributors. Pacific declined to make public a complete list of its contributors, but maintains that more of its $3.3-million annual budget comes from individuals and foundations than from corporations. Donors include Ford Motor Co., Boeing, the California Apartment Assn. and farmers, ranchers and property owners associations.

Best, Pacific’s president, denounced the 1984 report as a “phony” study. “Any case that benefited the public at large, as a practical matter, would benefit someone who has contributed to us,” he said. Many Pacific cases, Best added, have no natural corporate sponsors.

In Sacramento one afternoon, Pacific lawyer Deborah LaFetra argued a case that made Best’s point. It was her debut before the California Supreme Court, representing a deputy state attorney general who wanted to sue the state bar association for spending members’ dues on political and affirmative action-related activities. Many conservatives regard the bar as a liberal institution.

LaFetra, 29, a graduate of USC School of Law, framed her arguments as a test of constitutional rights. The court took the case under submission, and a grinning LaFetra left the hearing surrounded by colleagues congratulating her on her performance.

In December, the court ruled unanimously for Pacific, adding another trophy to the foundation’s collection.